Posted
by
msmash
on Sunday July 03, 2016 @01:30PM
from the who-to-hold-accountable dept.

From a TorrentFreak report:Following more pressure from rightsholders, domain name oversight body ICANN has again made it clear that it will not act as judge and jury in copyright disputes. In a letter to the president of the Intellectual Property Constituency, ICANN chief Stephen Crocker says that ICANN is neither "required or qualified" to pass judgment in such cases. This week, ICANN's Dr. Crocker responded to the April letter from IPC, confirming that his group will "bring enforcement actions" against registries and registrars that fail to include abuse warnings in their end-user agreements. However, ICANN also made it crystal clear that it won't be getting directly involved in disputes involving allegedly infringing domains. "This does not mean, however, that ICANN is required or qualified to make factual and legal determinations as to whether a Registered Name Holder or a website operator is violating applicable laws and governmental regulations, and to assess what would constitute an appropriate remedy for such activities in any particular situation," Dr. Crocker added.

Exactly right: They need a Legal Judgement in a Court of Law for the Juristiction they're claiming Infringment in. Otherwise, they'll take everyone that's not a member Off-Line for infringing and damn the actual legality of the matter.

If they lose it, the replacements won't hesitate to censor everything they can.

They already are in a way. There's another story on this site about how that music streaming site you love is going to go broke because the licensing fees they have to pay make them unprofitable.
That's what a consolidated market with strict IP laws get you.

The Intellectual Property Constituency is just looking for an easy enforcer that they can trigger with an email, instead of using the legal system designed and intended to handle intellectual property issues. It looks like little more than laziness on the part of the Intellectual Property Constituency.

Great point. Why go through all the rhetoric of the legal system (and continually lose) when you can send out thousands of automated emails? Hmm who do we know that loves to do that? Pretty obvious where this pressure is coming from. Kudos to ICANN for their response, it was appropriate. Now if they would only do something about the thousands of new garbage TLD's they themselves created.